MacSurf: NetSurf for Mac OS 9

Summary

The modern web, on a 25-year-old Mac. MacSurf is a web browser for Classic Mac OS 9 PowerPC. Real CSS3. Real ES5 JavaScript. Real PNGs with alpha. Running on a beige G3. WarningMacSurf is a very early alpha. It runs, it renders real CSS3, it executes JavaScript on a beige G3, and as of 2026-05-25 it speaks TLS 1.2 natively against real modern HTTPS sites (mactrove.com is the canonical hardware test target). Most websites in 2026 will still not work in it — heavy SPAs, modern CSS features MacSurf doesn't ship yet, missing form interactions, slow JS on real hardware. A lot is still rough. It is ready to be tested. If you've got a Power Mac G3 / G4 sitting around, please load it up and try it. Bug reports and screenshots from real hardware are exactly what this project needs right now. Coders welcome too; there's an enormous amount of CSS / DOM / JS surface left to fill in, and the code is approachable C89 (the same C you'd have written in 1999). See docs/status.md for the current punch list and docs/README.md for the doc index. What you should not expect yet: smooth browsing of arbitrary modern sites, video, audio, WebGL, service workers, anything React-heavy. What you can expect: hand-built pages, retro-style sites, a respectable subset of the CSS Grid spec, native HTTPS with the full Mozilla CA bundle, and the surreal experience of running ES5 JavaScript on a 233 MHz PowerPC. First numbered version: 0.1a1 (2026-05-20). Latest release: v0.7 — Cleanup (2026-05-26). Twelve issues closed in one sprint — cross-element var(), CSS Grid V2 alignment, image-purge on nav, gradients via standard CSS syntax. Full notes: docs/release-notes/MacSurf-0.7.md. The web outgrew Classic Mac OS twenty years ago. Modern HTTPS killed it for good around 2016. Today, an out-of-the-box G3 or G4 running OS 9 can barely reach a single live website. MacSurf brings the real web back. Not a screenshot proxy. Not a remote terminal session. A native browser, built with the tools that were on the pla...